


What's all this, then?

by fourshoesfrank



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Autism Spectrum, Autistic Adam Young, Autistic Anathema Device, Autistic Brian (Good Omens), Autistic Pepper (Good Omens), Autistic Wensleydale (Good Omens), F/M, Gen, Special Ed, disability twitter rocks, one (1) monty python reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 05:28:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19289089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: The Them spend a rainy afternoon at Jasmine Cottage, complaining about teachers and eating Anathema’s fruit.





	What's all this, then?

Anathema hadn’t been expecting the Them to walk two miles in a heavy rainstorm just to visit her, and her expectations were correct. Adam, Pepper, Brian, and Wensleydale hadn’t made the journey from their school to her house strictly by choice, as Adam was telling Anathema in the kitchen.

  
“My house has got a leaky pipe problem, Pepper’s mum doesn’t let Brian inside after what happened with the toad, Wensleydale lives too far away to walk from school, and Brian’s older sister would absolutely murder him if he brought us home today. She’s inviting her girlfriend over to meet their parents, or something. So, obviously, since none of our houses are good enough, we decided to come here,” Adam explained. He looked very pleased with the reasoning behind his _two mile_ walk, in a _heavy rainstorm_. Thank goodness it wasn’t thundering.

  
Anathema looked at the other three kids in her kitchen. She’d given them some food, and they’d all hung their coats and backpacks up in the closet near the front door, but they still looked wet and cold. She sighed, because there was work to do, and she knew she couldn’t concentrate with other people around. The sensible thing to do would be to wait until they dried off, thank them for visiting, explain that this really wasn’t a good time, call Newt, and have him pick the kids up and drop them off at the library or something. That would be sensible.

  
Anathema had a soft spot for the Them, though. She couldn’t quite put her finger on exactly why, but she was pretty fond of all four of them.

  
Alright, they could stay.

  
“That’s a very long explanation,” Anathema responded to Adam with a little laugh. “You kids can stay, just don’t make too much noise, okay?”

  
Brian pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!” he shouted, jumping into the air a little as he gestured. Pepper smacked his arm down almost as fast as it went up.

  
“She just said, ‘Don’t be loud’. I don’t know what _you_ think that means, but I’m going to work on my homework. The sooner this maths unit is over, the better.”

  
Pepper walked back to the hallway closet and took out her backpack. It was bright red, almost the same shade as the poncho she’d been wearing earlier. There were almost no books inside it, just two. They were labeled _Mathematics_ and _Grammar_. Pepper sat down at the kitchen table, took out a notebook with a red cover that was almost as bright as her backpack, opened the math book, and started doing her homework.

  
Shrugging, Brian followed suit. It was clear that he didn’t finish any of his work at school, since his backpack was crammed full of textbooks and notebooks. The outside of the bag was camouflage print, and all of his textbooks were covered in homemade brown paper bags folded to fit over them. These bags had been decorated with drawings of people on horses holding guns up in the air, small doodles of little alien creatures, and some scrawled messages that Anathema probably couldn’t decipher if she tried. The pictures were actually pretty good, though.

  
Brian opened his math book to the same page as Pepper and started working. He asked her for help almost immediately, and, to Anathema’s surprise, Pepper gave it to him. By this time, Wensleydale and Adam also had their math books open, so all four of them were clustered at the table listening to Pepper explain fractional division to them.

  
Anathema decided it was okay to leave them on their own for a while. She went upstairs to finish her work undistracted by sixth-grader math discussions.

  
Wait, how did grades work in England? Most eleven year olds in America were in fifth grade, but the Them had all turned eleven last school year, so they would turn twelve this school year...they would either be in sixth or fifth grade. They were doing sixth-grade level math, but Anathema still wasn’t certain. She’d have to ask Newt about that. He might know.

 

-

 

“Didn’t Mrs. Schubert lock you in the bathroom when we were six, Brian?”

  
“Oh, yeah. She was _horrid_. I don’t know why our school even hired her. Did you know that she got fired from teaching in the United States for doing the same thing to another kid? And then she came here and got herself fired again for the exact same thing. Bloody stupid,” Brian said.

  
“Actually, I didn’t know that. You’re right, Brian; she was horrid. She took away my glasses because I kept chewing on them. I couldn’t see the board,” Wensleydale replied.

  
Anathema had finished her work a half an hour ago, so she’d opened the door to her office to let the air flow through the house better while she checked her Twitter feed. She hadn’t realized that her guests’ conversation would travel with the airflow.

  
For a while, Pepper and Adam had argued about some kind of British candy, but after that the conversation had turned a darker corner. All four of the Them were in their school’s special education program, in some way, shape, or form. Adam and Wensleydale weren’t actually part of the program, but since Pepper and Brian had learning aides (that they didn’t seem to need), they got a fair amount of exposure to it. They all hated it, that much was clear.

  
That wasn’t surprising. Anathema herself had been homeschooled, but she hadn’t grown up under a rock. She knew how to use the internet, how to get a Twitter account, and how to follow disability activists. Nobody who had actually experienced it thought very highly of special ed. This was a constant. American health care was too expensive, the straw ban was absolute rubbish, abled people were very quick to judge and very hard to educate, and special ed was no picnic. The four pillars of disability Twitter.

  
Anathema was suddenly very grateful that she’d been homeschooled by a parent who knew how she learned, and knew how to help her understand things. She probably would have done a lot worse in the American school system.

  
“What time is it, Wensley?” Adam asked. “We might need to get a ride back into town if it keeps raining like this.”

  
“Actually, I’ve forgotten my watch today, so I don’t know what time it is,” the smaller boy said. “Anathema would be able to tell us what time it is, but we don’t actually know where she is.”

  
“I bet she’s upstairs in a secret room, drawing one of those cool circles on the floor like the witches do in old movies about the devil,” Brian declared. “Hey, I could draw that!” Anathema pictured a cartoon lightbulb going off above his head as he said it.

  
She thought it was time for the Them to be getting home, since it was almost six in the evening. Doing that was easier said than done. Anathema didn’t have a car; at least, she didn’t have a car within reach in Tadfield. Her hand-me-down 2001 Subaru Forrester was still in California, probably sitting in the garage playing host to a family of spiders right now. Anathema couldn’t drive the Them anywhere, and there were no bus stops nearby. They would all have to wait until Newt came home, and he could drive them all back to their respective houses.

  
Anathema headed downstairs to tell the four kids her plan for getting them back to their families. Honestly, she only thought that Wensleydale was especially concerned about it, but it would be better to tell everyone at the same time.

  
“Oh, hi, Anathema,” Adam said offhandedly as she entered the kitchen. “D’you have any more food?”

  
“What? Oh, yeah, I’ve got a lot of fruit in the fridge. There’s also some bread and stuff to put on sandwiches in the cabinet over the sink, if you want to make one. Help yourselves, kids.” She smiled at them. Wensleydale was the only one of them who took the time to smile back. The other three were already digging into the container of strawberries that she had specifically put aside to cook with later, but...she wasn’t mad at them. There were other strawberries in the world.

  
“Anathema, you’re a witch, right?” Brian asked, sucking some watery juice from the fruit off of his thumb. Anathema nodded.

  
“I call it occultism, but essentially yes, I practice witchcraft.” The practice of astrology was actually one of her special interests. It was all Anathema could do not to begin swinging her arms in excitement right there in her kitchen. She had an audience of children who didn’t know she was autistic, and she didn’t want them to find out that way. She’d rather tell them herself.

  
“Can you put curses on people?” Brian asked her. He had sucked all the fruit juice off his right hand and was starting to clean up his left hand.

  
“Well, it’s not recommended,” Anathema answered him, “but I can do it. Why, who do you want to curse?”

  
“A teacher at our school, Ms. Mandella. She’s always treating us like we can’t do anything, especially me and Pepper. None of us like her.”

  
“She’s our music teacher,” Pepper explained, “and she made me sing the _boy_ part of our Christmas musical. Which, by the way, was absolute rubbish because she doesn’t know how to teach us anything.”

  
Ah. Anathema knew Pepper was trans. So the teacher was ableist and transphobic...she sounded like she was worth cursing.

  
“Actually, that’s not all she’s done. She made me go with the _girls_ during our school’s Christmas musical. We all had to wear little elf tutus. I found the whole thing quite uncomfortable. Actually, I felt very insulted.”

  
Oh, so Wensleydale was trans too. No wonder he wore vests so often.

  
“Yeah, she does seem like a person I’d like to curse. I’ll get around to it sometime, don’t worry.

  
“Guys, I actually came down to tell you that since I don’t have a car, you’ll have to wait until Newt come back before you can go home. There’s no way I’m letting you kids walk home in this downpour. It started thundering a couple minutes ago, did you hear it?”

  
“Actually, this building is quite quite well insulated on the ground floor. The first floor might have thinner walls, maybe that’s why you heard it and we didn’t.”

  
Anathema blinked at Wensleydale. “Um, the ground floor and the first floor are the same thing,” she said, as if stating the obvious, which she was. She didn’t know why all four of the Them were staring at her like she’d grown a second head. Oh, was this another weird British thing?

  
Apparently, it was. “In England, the part of a building that’s on the ground is the ground floor,” Adam explained. “The numbers don’t start until the next one up.”

  
“But that doesn’t make sense! The ground floor is on the ground, and it’s also the first story of the building, so they’re the same thing!”

  
“No, actually...”

  
This argument went on for quite some time. Eventually, Newt walked through the front door, sopping wet, and declared that if he never had to drive anywhere ever again, he’d be eternally grateful. He started on a rant about his workplace almost as soon as he was inside the doorway. It was clear he was a little worn out.

  
“Anathema, you’ll never guess what Shadwell’s got me doing now. He told me to go buy a pair of binoculars and—“

  
Newt stopped cold when he saw the four children sitting at the kitchen table.

  
“What’s all this, then?” he asked, although who he was asking wasn’t clear. Anathema answered.

  
“They spent the afternoon here. Can you give them a ride home?”

  
Newt sighed. “I guess. How far away do you lot live, then?”

  
“Not far,” Adam replied. “If you give me your phone I can put our addresses in your maps app.”

  
“Oh, Adam,” Anathema said hastily, “I don’t think that’s a good—“

  
“Alright,” Newt cut in. He handed Adam a ridiculously outdated Samsung flip phone that made the kids giggle at the sight of it. The thing did have a Maps application, though, and Adam plotted out his and his friends’ addresses in the blink of an eye.

  
“Keep the phone with you. You can read the directions off to me,” Newt suggested when Adam tried to hand the device back. Adam nodded and set it down on the table while he packed up his bookbag. The other three kids did the same.

  
“Well, it was nice having you kids over,” Anathema said. “Maybe next time I’ll invite you, for a change.”

  
“Bye, Anathema.”

  
“Yes, goodbye, Anathema.”

  
“We’ll come back soon.”

  
“Don’t forget to curse our music teacher!”

  
As soon as the five people were crammed into Newt’s car relatively safely (three of the five had seatbelts on), Anathema went upstairs to her office and opened a book about curses.

**Author's Note:**

> listen i know anathema’s family is rich as shit and all but she’s the kind of person to drive a subaru forrester okay
> 
> also yes i’m calling out transmascs why do we love vests so much (technically i’m genderfluid but i’m a boy today and literally all my trans guy friends wear vests a lot?? what’s up w that??)
> 
> comments and/or kudos (but mostly comments) are greatly appreciated!!!


End file.
